Africa rising?

Beresford, Alexander

doi:10.1080/03056244.2016.1149369

Cited by 41 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Our own analytical contribution to this effort suggests that the resilience-centred vision of African progress that guides the Africa Climate Business Plan mirrors the traditional conceptions of development from the past, and is unlikely to enable the continent to, in the words of the Bank (World Bank 2015, p. 3), 'deliver on its promises'. While playing into the widely popularised if fundamentally inadequate 'Africa rising' narrative (Sylla 2014, Pillay 2015, Beresford 2016, Taylor 2016a, the Bank's self-proclaimed mission to strengthen, power and enable resilience does not offer the continent anything new beyond a shift in discourse.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

Mikulewicz

Taylor

2019

New Political Economy

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Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank's Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

Mikulewicz

Taylor

2019

New Political Economy

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“…As one of the first physical spaces on the continent for African techies and innovators to meet, iHub established itself as a requisite stop for those interested in technology in the region (e.g., CNN, 2012). While iHub's fame and reputation as the nexus of African technology entrepreneurship was crucial for its material success, the everyday experience of being part of the regular tour groups seeking to observe the "Africa Rising" narrative (Beresford, 2016;Nothias, 2014) was a drain on both Kenyan entrepreneurs working out of the space as well as staff.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open Ethnographic Archiving as Feminist, Decolonizing Practice

Okune

2020

Catalyst

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Dubbed Silicon Savannah, Nairobi has become a hot spot of tech development that promises to “save Africa.” Qualitative research—carried out by a tangle of private, academic, and non-profit organizations—is part of the work, promising to reveal how people in Kenya are building and benefiting from a dazzling array of digital products. Amidst the enthusiasm, longstanding problems with ways in which research data in Nairobi is conceived, collected, and shared are easily glossed over. This article advances thinking about the politics of qualitative data, unraveling normative concepts like ethics and transparency by both examining existing data practices and modeling alternatives. I describe the sociotechnical infrastructure underlying the ethnographic project, detailing tactics for deploying an instance of open source software—the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE)—to draw research interlocutors into collaborative effort to understand and build decolonized qualitative data infrastructures. Through such processes I learned that collaborating on data not only refreshes the social contract of qualitative work; it can also enhance its robustness and validity. I advise scholars to better document our own knowing practices in order to attend to the inevitability of margins created through all data practices, including our own

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“…The optimistic narrative is inspired by the paradigm of modernization, which is continually being formulated and re-formulated, and proposing capitalism as the only way, which must also contribute to democratization (Amin 1998;Beresford 2016). It should not be forgotten that the African economic trajectory follows the course of the evolution of the economic discipline (Obeng-Odoom 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deinstitutionalization of the State and Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Contribution to the Critique of the Neoinstitutionalist Analysis of Development

López-Castellano

Manzanera-Ruiz

Lizárraga

2019

Review of Radical Political Economics

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In recent years, a euphoric shift has taken place, typified by the narrative of “Africa rising,” which attempts to promote the idea of an economically emerging continent. In the Afro-optimist discourse, the idea is implicit that the neoliberal narrative has triumphed. However, critical voices argue that the discourse ignores the political environment under which African growth has been produced. This article critically reflects on the explanations of the neoinstitutionalist approach to development, the historical process of state formation and colonization in Africa. Following the proposal of postcolonial theory, sovereignty, tax, and violence are analyzed. Finally, the contradictory policies of the neoliberal experiment are demonstrated, which are leading to the deinstitutionalization of the State and to violence. JEL Classification: F54, F63, E02, N17

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Africa rising?

Cited by 41 publications

References 12 publications

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

Open Ethnographic Archiving as Feminist, Decolonizing Practice

Deinstitutionalization of the State and Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Contribution to the Critique of the Neoinstitutionalist Analysis of Development

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